After introducing the no-cloning theorem and the most common forms of approximate quantum cloning, universal quantum cloning is considered in detail. The connections it has with universal NOT-gate, quantum cryptography and state estimation are presented and briefly discussed. The state estimation connection is used to show that the amount of extractable classical information and total Bloch vector length are conserved in universal quantum cloning. The 1 2 qubit cloner is also shown to obey a complementarity relation between local and nonlocal information. These are interpreted to be a consequence of the conservation of total information in cloning. Finally, the performance of the 1 M cloning network discovered by Bužek, Hillery and Knight is studied in the presence of decoherence using the Barenco et al. approach where random phase fluctuations are attached to 2-qubit gates. The expression for average fidelity is calculated for three cases and it is found to depend on the optimal fidelity and the average of the phase fluctuations in a specific way. It is conjectured to be the form of the average fidelity in the general case. While the cloning network is found to be rather robust, it is nevertheless argued that the scalability of the quantum network implementation is poor by studying the effect of decoherence during the preparation of the initial state of the cloning machine in the 1 ! 2 case and observing that the loss in average fidelity can be large. This affirms the result by Maruyama and Knight, who reached the same conclusion in a slightly different manner.
After introducing the no-cloning theorem and the most common forms of approximate quantum cloning, universal quantum cloning is considered in detail. The connections it has with universal NOT-gate, quantum cryptography and state estimation are presented and briefly discussed. The state estimation connection is used to show that the amount of extractable classical information and total Bloch vector length are conserved in universal quantum cloning. The 1 2 qubit cloner is also shown to obey a complementarity relation between local and nonlocal information. These are interpreted to be a consequence of the conservation of total information in cloning. Finally, the performance of the 1 M cloning network discovered by Bužek, Hillery and Knight is studied in the presence of decoherence using the Barenco et al. approach where random phase fluctuations are attached to 2-qubit gates. The expression for average fidelity is calculated for three cases and it is found to depend on the optimal fidelity and the average of the phase fluctuations in a specific way. It is conjectured to be the form of the average fidelity in the general case. While the cloning network is found to be rather robust, it is nevertheless argued that the scalability of the quantum network implementation is poor by studying the effect of decoherence during the preparation of the initial state of the cloning machine in the 1 ! 2 case and observing that the loss in average fidelity can be large. This affirms the result by Maruyama and Knight, who reached the same conclusion in a slightly different manner.
We pose the question whether the asymptotic equivalence between quantum cloning and quantum state estimation, valid at the single-clone level, still holds when all clones are examined globally. We conjecture that the answer is affirmative and present a large amount of evidence supporting our conjecture, developing techniques to derive optimal asymptotic cloners and proving their equivalence with estimation in virtually all scenarios considered in the literature. Our analysis covers the case of arbitrary finite sets of states, arbitrary families of coherent states, arbitrary phase- and multiphase-covariant sets of states, and two-qubit maximally entangled states. In all these examples we observe that the optimal asymptotic cloners enjoy a universality property, consisting in the fact that scaling of their fidelity does not depend on the specific details of the input states, but only on the number of free parameters needed to specify them.
Due to the axioms of quantum mechanics, perfect cloning of an unknown quantum state is impossible. But since imperfect cloning is still possible, a question arises: ``Is there an optimal quantum cloning machine?'' Buzek and Hillery answered this question and constructed their famous B-H quantum cloning machine. The B-H machine clones the state of an arbitrary single qubit in an optimal manner and hence it is universal. Generalizing this machine for a two-qubit system is straightforward, but during this procedure, except for product states, this machine loses its universality and becomes a state-dependent cloning machine. In this paper, we propose some classes of optimal universal local quantum state cloners for a particular class of two-qubit systems, more precisely, for a class of states with known Schmidt basis. We then extend our machine to the case that the Schmidt basis of the input state is deviated from the local computational basis of the machine. We show that more local quantum coherence existing in the input state corresponds to less fidelity between the input and output states. Also we present two classes of a state-dependent local quantum copying machine. Furthermore, we investigate local broadcasting of two aspects of quantum correlations, i.e., quantum entanglement and quantum discord, defined, respectively, within the entanglement-separability paradigm and from an information-theoretic perspective. The results show that although quantum correlation is, in general, very fragile during the broadcasting procedure, quantum discord is broadcasted more robustly than quantum entanglement.
No-cloning theorem is fundamental for quantum mechanics and for quantum information science that states an unknown quantum state cannot be cloned perfectly. However, we can try to clone a quantum state approximately with the optimal fidelity, or instead, we can try to clone it perfectly with the largest probability. Thus various quantum cloning machines have been designed for different quantum information protocols. Specifically, quantum cloning machines can be designed to analyze the security of quantum key distribution protocols such as BB84 protocol, six-state protocol, B92 protocol and their generalizations. Some well-known quantum cloning machines include universal quantum cloning machine, phase-covariant cloning machine, the asymmetric quantum cloning machine and the probabilistic quantum cloning machine etc. In the past years, much progress has been made in studying quantum cloning machines and their applications and implementations, both theoretically and experimentally. In this review, we will give a complete description of those important developments about quantum cloning and some related topics. On the other hand, this review is self-consistent, and in particular, we try to present some detailed formulations so that further study can be taken based on those results.
We investigate the asymptotic relationship between quantum cloning and quantum estimation from the global point of view where all the copies produced by the cloner are considered jointly. For an N-to-M cloner, we consider the overall fidelity between the state of the M output systems and the state of M ideal copies, and we ask whether the optimal fidelity is attained by a measure and-prepare protocol in the limit M -> \infty. In order to gain intuition into the general problem, we analyze two concrete examples: i) cloning qubit states on the equator of the Bloch sphere and ii) cloning two-qubit maximally entangled states. In the first case, we show that the optimal measure-and-prepare fidelity converges to the fidelity of the optimal cloner in the limit M -> \infty. In the second case, we restrict our attention to economical covariant cloners, and again, we exhibit a measure-and-prepare protocol that achieves asymptotically the optimal fidelity. Quite counterintuitively, in both cases the optimal states that have to be prepared in order to maximize the overall fidelity are not product states corresponding to M identical copies, but instead suitable M-partite entangled states.
Quantum mechanics put restriction on performing some task which we can do classically. One such restriction is that we cannot copy an arbitrary quantum state. This is known as No-cloning theorem. Although quantum mechanics forbid us to construct a perfect cloner, there is no restriction to construct an imperfect cloner. Therefore, we have constructed and studied a special kind of quantum cloning machine named as Hybrid quantum cloning machine which is nothing but a different combination of pre-existing quantum cloning machines. We showed that this hybrid quantum cloning machine sometime gives better quality copy than the pre-existing quantum cloners. Quantum entanglement is a very astonishing property in a multi-partite system and it is a very useful ingredient of quantum information theory. Therefore broadcasting (cloning) of entanglement is a very important subject to study. In this regard we have studied the broadcasting of entanglement using state dependent quantum cloning machine. Further, we have investigated the problem of secretly broadcasting of three-qubit entangled state between two distant partners. Linearity of quantum mechanics put another restriction on deletion of an arbitrary quantum state i.e. an arbitrary quantum state against a copy cannot be perfectly deleted. Like cloning machine one can construct an approximate deletion machine also. Therefore, we have constructed an universal deletion machine in the sense that the fidelity of deletion does not depend on the input state and showed that the fidelity of deletion is 3/4 . Further we showed that the fidelity of deletion depends on the blank state at the output and it can be improved from the value 3/4 for certain blank state. Moreover, we have studied the case where two cloned copies are given at the input of the deletion machine.
In this paper, we considered asymmetric 1→n cloning circuits generalized from the asymmetric 1→2 cloning circuit proposed by Bu\v{z}ek \textit{et al.} [Phys. Rev. A 56, 3446 (1997)]. The generalization is based on an information flux insight of the original cloning circuit. Specifically, the circuit separately and sequentially transfers the Z-type information and X-type information of the input state to the output copies with controlled-not gates. The initial input state of the clones defines the asymmetry among all output clones. Although the generalized circuits do not perform universally, the averaged fidelities over a uniform distribution of all possible input cloning states saturate the optimal fidelity tradeoff relations of universal asymmetric cloning.